Abstract

This project aims to enrich the history Department’s new Western history curriculum and the teaching of non-Chinese culture in general by building, housing, cataloguing and publicizing a mini-museum of several dozen ethically sourced replicas of representative material culture from the last two thousand years. These will be held in Special Collections and will be catalogued by a student helper hired for this purpose. In this way, this project aims to create a permanent resource for the teaching of Western and world history at CUHK and thereby contribute to internationalization at home and cross-cultural competence. This will also complement the Chinese collections of the CUHK University Art Museum, and open up the possibility for comparative (East-West) teaching activities.

Based on similar collections and teaching techniques used at major international universities, the collection and the courses will include structured classes centred on the objects as well as two assessments (one compulsory and one optional) that will require students to draw on them. As the collection will be useful for colleagues teaching outside the history department, we will also organize an event to publicize the collection, which will include outside visitors who will help bring the objects to life.